Releases

• Tails 3.15 was released on July 9th (bugfix release).

• Tails 3.16 is scheduled for September 3rd.

Documentation and website

• We updated most of our documentation to Tails based on Debian 10 (Buster). (#16282)

• We simplified and updated our description of the system requirements. (#11663 and #16810).

• We fixed the display of the "Tor check" button on the homepage of Tor Browser. (#15312)

  This "Tor check" button is used by around 10% of users.

• We removed the "% translated" indication from our website because it was misleading. (#16867)

User experience

• Odile Carabantes and Enso Studio created an animation on using the boot menu to start Tails.

• We tested 2 alternatives to Etcher as it has some privacy issues (#16381):

  • Rawrite32 (#16553)
  • Win32 Disk Images (#14447)

• We proposed some small improvements to adjust Tails Installer to the fact that we are now distributing USB images:

  • Rename Tails Installer as Tails Cloner (#16907)
  • Use USB images instead of ISO images in Tails Installer (#16906)

• We proposed a design to use Tails Installer to backup the persistent volume.

Hot topics on our help desk

1. Many people are still having graphic card problems, specially #16815 Error starting GDM with [AMD/ATI] Carrizo.

2. We got a lot of support requests about 'Tails not being able to delete images'. After a while we realised it was because of a confusing part of our documentation. We will try to fix that soon: #16975 Users get confused at our documentation and think Tails does not delete images at all.

3. Users keep trying to use Electrum even when, at the moment, it is not easy in Tails.

Infrastructure

• We finished fixing the description of the mechanism for the revocation of the Tails signing key after an external review. (#15604)

• We discussed additions of new people to the Tails signing key revocation mechanism. (#16665)

• The new backups system for our entire infrastructure is live. (#15071)

• We upgraded our Puppet master (sic) to Debian 10 (Buster), which supports PuppetDB out of the box. This allowed us to drop a bunch of hackish workarounds and it was a great way to fast-track the onboarding of zen, our new sysadmin. (#16460)

• We made great progress on our web translation platform:

  • We fixed a number of bugs identified since we submitted the platform to a production workload.
  • We modified in depth the permissions model to address issues identified by a security review.
  • We sent a public call for testing.
  • We kept working on documentation for translators.
  • We adjusted the resources allocated to the VM that runs this platform and deployed Apache mod_security to make it a bit less scary.

Funding

• Our proposal to the Mozilla Open Source Support was accepted. It will fund our work to:

  • Improve Upgrades, late 2019 and early 2020 (#8415 and #15281)
  • Support Secure Boot, mid 2020 (#6560)
  • Migrate to GitLab, early 2020 (#15878)

Outreach

Past events

• A few Tails contributors attended DebConf19, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference.

  intrigeri and nodens ran a skill-sharing session about AppArmor.

• Ulrike, anonym, and sajolida attended Tor Meeting in Stockholm, Sweden.

Upcoming events

• carlosm2 is organizing a testing of Tails 4.0~beta1 at the Rancho Electrónico en Ciudad de Mexico on Saturday August 17.

On-going discussions

• We asked for comments on a proposal for a "People" page on our website that would be both trustworthy, human, and respect our pseudonyms:

  https://lists.autistici.org/message/20190720.142700.203814ca.en.html

• We asked for comments on the proposal to use Tails Installer to backup the persistent volume:

  http://lists.autistici.org/message/20190723.163900.7bfc4f4a.en.html

Translations

All the website

• de: 40% (2292) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 37% words translated
• es: 53% (3002) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy, 45% words translated
• fa: 32% (1803) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 34% words translated
• fr: 89% (5025) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy, 88% words translated
• it: 34% (1947) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 30% words translated
• pt: 26% (1465) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 22% words translated

Total original words: 59619

Core pages of the website

• de: 69% (1216) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy, 71% words translated
• es: 83% (1453) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy, 84% words translated
• fa: 35% (624) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 32% words translated
• fr: 96% (1680) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy, 96% words translated
• it: 65% (1150) strings translated, 16% strings fuzzy, 66% words translated
• pt: 47% (823) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy, 48% words translated

Total original words: 16505

Metrics

• Tails has been started more than 759 660 times this month. This makes 24 505 boots a day on average.